As Ryan tweeted, this really is “condensed years of blog posts and project experiences into a 30-minute talk.”
So. Good.
I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on Apple campus, with a lot of whiteboards, talking about what iMovie should be (and should not be). It was as pure as pure gets, in terms of building software. Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we’d go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we’d iterate, again and again and again. That’s how it always went. Iteration. It’s the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it.
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One of the things about designing products that can come up is Ego, or Being Right, or whatever that is called. I’m not sure how this evolved, but when I worked with Steve on product design, there was kind of an approach we took, unconsciously, which I characterize in my mind as a “cauldron”. There might be 3 or 4 or even 10 of us in the room, looking at, say, an iteration of iPhoto. Ideas would come forth, suggestions, observations, whatever. We would “throw them into the cauldron”, and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas.
Via @daringfireball
Quick and easy way to build your product tours with Twitter Bootstrap Popovers.
22 guidelines written by Pixar story artist Emma Coats.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
Nice catch by @rjs and as he said, it applies to product design too. Which is interesting if you think about it. Is product design storytelling in a way? Hmmmm…
“Where to Draw the Line” is a clever post by Des Traynor of Intercom.
So much is written about the pursuit of simplicity these days but often there is a confusion. There is a fundamental difference between making a product simple, and making a simple product.
I like the advice to focus on user’s workflow in its entirety. It circles around the jobs-to-be-done approach of which I am more and more fan.
Via @jasonfried